City to settle wrongful DUI lawsuit
Plaintiff claimed culture of competitive pursuit of arrests
The city of Loveland will pay a Fort Collins man arrested by the Loveland Police Department in 2020 in what he alleged was a wrongful DUI arrest $400,000 to settle the civil lawsuit levied against the city.
Attorney Sarah Schielke of the Life and Liberty Law Office officially announced the settlement Monday morning, coming nearly two years after she announced the civil rights lawsuit on behalf of Harris Elias.
The suit, originally filed in January 2022, claimed that Elias was wrongfully arrested by LPD Officer William Gates in early 2020 for DUI. That complaint, which only named Loveland and Gates as defendants, alleged three claims in connection to the arrest two years ago: unlawful arrest without probable cause, arrest without probable cause violating the Colorado constitution Article II Section 7 and malicious prosecution under the Fourth Amendment.
In March of 2022, Schielke filed an amended complaint to the United States District Court in Denver. The amended complaint had the same three claims but came with several notable additions, including naming Sgt. Antolina Hill as one of the defendants as well as including a number of other stories alleging wrongful DUI arrest and information on the culture of the LPD’S DUI enforcement.
The suit claimed that Elias, while driving in Fort Collins, was pulled over by Gates in early 2020 as part of a Reduce All Impaired Driving inter-police agency task force. When Gates arrested Elias that night, the suit claimed that the Fort Collins resident blew a 0% blood-alcohol content level and then later tested negative on a follow-up blood test.
The amended suit also claimed that former Chief Bob Ticer had purposefully created a culture of competitive pursuit of DUI arrests with reckless disregard for driver innocence, according to Schielke’s Monday release.
However, this was not the only alleged wrongful DUI case Elias was involved in, with Schielke filing five lawsuits, one for each of five people, against the Fort Collins Police Services in May of this year for a series of different arrests; Elias is one of the five people included in the series of suits,
which Schielke told the Reporter-herald is still ongoing.
Kim Overholt, manager of communications and engagement for the city of Loveland, wrote in an email to the Reporter-herald that while the city will be paying out the settlement, there is no admission of liability on the part of Loveland or its officers related to the settlement.
“Any time there is a civil lawsuit filed against our officers alleging misconduct, the department opens an internal affairs investigation but suspends the investigation pending the outcome of the civil litigation to allow the process to work its way through the courts,” she wrote.”
Schielke said in her release that the settlement — which she believes is the largest non-confidential monetary payment ever made in Colorado to settle a civil rights lawsuit where the primary allegation is a wrongful DUI arrest with no physical injuries or jailtime — sends a powerful message: “Policing is not a game.”
“DUI enforcement should never be a competition,” she said in the release. “There are innocent people’s lives and jobs at stake. Let this serve as a reminder to every cop in this state — if you decide to ignore all signs of driver innocence just to get another “notch’ on your DUI arrest belt — you will be held accountable.”
“No amount of money will ever return me to the peaceful state of naivete to our broken system that I enjoyed before I was stopped by former Officer Gates that night and put through the nightmare of this wrongful arrest,” Elias said in the release. “Nothing will shake from my heart the horror and shock I felt after blowing zeroes and not being set free. All I can hope is that with this lawsuit, with Gates gone from the department, and with this settlement, I have saved at least one other person from having to experience what I did.”